Ajaxus place on the net

Adobe today will bolster its “Platform for Rich Internet Apps” with the full release of a trio of developer tools. Each of the tools Adobe is releasing is either free or open source. Along with the boost to Adobe’s RIA platform, a number of companies are also announcing applications built on Adobe’s cross platform system runtime, AIR.

Perhaps the most significant of Adobe’s announcements is that their much-touted desktop runtime for Rich Internet Apps, AIR, is coming out of beta about a year after being announced. The final release will be free on the AIR web site for Mac and Windows (with Linux support promised in “upcoming versions”).

Along with AIR, Adobe is also announcing the final release of Flex 3 and the Flex Builder. Flex is an open source framework for building applications on the Adobe Flash and AIR platforms, while Flex Builder is an IDE for Flex. The Flex 3 SDK comes out of beta today and is released under the Mozilla Public License on the Flex web site.

Flex, Flash, and AIR form the cornerstone of Adobe’s “Platform for Rich Internet Apps,” a complete end-to-end solution for creating and deploying RIAs to the web and desktop. This has been a big year for the RIA platform at Adobe, according to Adrian Ludwig, the group manager in the company’s platform and development unit.

Ludwig told us that 2007 was a “real turning point for the industry” and that Adobe saw broad based adoption of their RIA platform. Oracle, for example, is using Flex to create interface elements for applications, while Adobe has worked with BEA to comarket Flex Builder along with BEA’s own developer tools. The wide adoption of Adobe’s RIA technologies “was confirmation of the value that these types of applications have,” said Ludwig.

At DEMO this year, Ludwig told us, there were three companies whose entire business was built on Adobe AIR. Considering AIR debuted just over a year ago itself at DEMO (as Apollo), that is fairly amazing. In just a year, Adobe’s runtime has matured enough that entrepreneurs are willing to build entire businesses around it — even when AIR has been in beta until today. “That, combined with our commitment not just to innovation, but to open source technologies where it makes sense,” said Ludwig, “I think that’s going to really further innovation and advancements in the RIA space.”

Along with the new releases of Flex and AIR, a number of companies are announcing public releases of AIR applications, including Nickelodeon, eBay, AOL, Nasdaq, and the New York Times Company.

Adobe is also releasing the final first version of Blaze DS under the GPL license. Blaze DS was announced two months ago and is a server side remoting and messaging technology that was previously only available as part of the LifeCycle suite of products.

The attraction to Adobe’s platform makes a lot of sense. They offer an end-to-end solution, and Flex and AIR makes the question of desktop vs. online a deployment decision, and not a development decision. Write the application once in Flex, and deploy to the web or to the desktop with AIR with very few code changes. That sort of flexibility is very attractive to many developers.

Today I came across this post from Tim Anderson at his blog in which he describes the pros and cons of this new technology. Here it is:

In essence, AIR is the Flash player supplemented by additional features to enable applications that are not browser-hosted, but installed as desktop applications. AIR is great for some scenarios, weak for others. Here’s 10 reasons to love it:

1. Fast execution. ActionScript 3.0 has a JIT (just-in-time) compiler, putting it on a par with Java or .NET for raw performance.

2. Cross-platform. AIR apps will run on Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel), Linux (though not in the beta).

3. Easy conversion of existing Flex or HTML applications. It’s the same basic runtime. In the case of HTML, AIR apps rely on WebKit, the core component in Apple’s Safari web browser.

4. Easy installation. Provided the runtime has installed successfully, installing AIR applications is likely to be be trouble-free, since all the files go into the application directory.

5. SQLite. AIR applications have use of a fast local database.

6. Synchronization services provided you use LiveCycle. Synchronization is the difficult part of enabling offline support in occasionally connected applications.

7. Rich design and multimedia. This is Flash, so ideal for highly customized UIs, animation, sound and video. Adobe is proving the point by creating a media player built with AIR. Existing Flash developers can easily use their skills to build AIR applications.

8. Great for web vendors who want a desktop presence. For example, one of the demo applications is for buying on eBay. If eBay persuades you to install it, then it is no longer dependent on you firing up a web browser and navigating to its site. It is also a good way to disintermediate Google.

9. Declarative programming via FLEX. Declarative programming is the best way to code a GUI and consume components.

10. ActionScript 3.0 combines the flexibility of JavaScript with grown-up object orientation. Option for dynamic or strict typing according to developer preference.

So is AIR your next development platform? Maybe, but there are some downsides:

1. Limited extensibility. AIR apps have file access, clipboard access, support multiple windows, support drag and drop, and can trigger notifications (”toast” in Windows). If you app needs to interact with the desktop in other ways, the chances are that AIR is not suitable. For example, there’s no access to COM automation, and no way to execute external applications. The reason is to maintain cross-platform compatibility. That’s a worthy goal, but it would be good to have a way out of the sandbox. Unlike Java or .NET, you cannot extend AIR with custom native code libraries. Nor can you call operating system APIs.

2. Database access limited to SQLite or web services.

3. Enterprises need to roll out applications over the network in a controlled manner. AIR has no specific support for enterprise deployment. On Windows, AIR does not use the Windows Installer service. Either Adobe or 3rd parties will need to create deployment wrappers to overcome this.

4. Proprietary technology. AIR applications depend on Adobe’s runtime.

5. No threading support. Architect Kevin Lynch says this is a strong candidate for a future release.

6. No model for commercial components. It is not clear to me how a component vendor could sell an AIR component while protecting it from unlicensed deployment. This may limit the availability of 3rd party components, with a corresponding impact on productivity.

7. Schizophrenic development model. AIR supports either Flex development, or HTML applications which run in WebKit. The ugly side of this flexibility is that there are two SDKs, even two JavaScript virtual machines with different capabilities and characteristics. While it is nice to have a way to render HTML, I am not convinced that the web application model is worth it, given the complications it causes. After all, web applications run perfectly well in the browser.

8. Security concerns. AIR is close to the worst of both worlds, being tightly sandboxed from a developer perspective, but not particularly safe from the user’s perspective. Adobe says it will allow unsigned applications, which I think is a mistake.* AIR has the same access to the file system as the user, which in the case of users running on Windows XP with full admin rights is very extensive. Example bad scenarios would include downloading malware and placing it your startup folder, or searching your file system for bank details and uploading them to some internet location. That said, Adobe says there will be more security features, so conclusions are premature.

9. Synchronization service depends on LiveCycle, the server-side piece which runs on J2E application servers. This is one of the ways Adobe makes money out of AIR, with the other obvious one being design and development tools. A consequence of point 4 above.

10. Lack of UI standards may lead to annoying inconsistencies between AIR applications. We are used to this on the Web; now it is coming to the desktop as well.

Check it out here

Folks at ajaxian.com had this post today:

The Adobe bus tour has published some videos from the first leg of the tour.

Andre Charland spoke on how to build Ajax applications on Air. The talk has good demos and examples, such as the Salesforce.com demo.

Kevin Hoyt also gave some good JavaScript-y talks such as:

• Intro to Adobe AIR with HTML and JavaScript
• ActionScript / JavaScript Script Bridging in Adobe AIR

The second leg of the bus kicks off next week, and you can check out if it hits a city near you. I am hoping to be on the third leg at some point.

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The guys at ajaxian.com had posted a link to the electronic copy of that book. Here is the link to download. Here is also amazon link. The pocket guide covers:

* Introduction to AIR
* Getting Started with AIR development
* Working with JavaScript and HTML within AIR
* AIR Mini Cookbook
* Command line tools
* Aliases

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AIR:Documentation